US faces downward spiral in Afghan war

[pkpatriotic]

US faces downward spiral in Afghan war, says leaked intelligence report
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor and Richard Norton-Taylor

• White House forced to reconsider strategy
• Washington wants Nato to confront drug lords

US intelligence agencies believe the war in Afghanistan is in "a downward spiral", sparking an urgent strategy rethink by the Bush administration as it enters its last three months in office, it was reported yesterday.

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan, a joint report by America's 16 spy agencies, is not due to be published until after next month's presidential election, but a draft version was leaked to US newspapers calling into question the coherence of US and Nato policy.

The document also places considerable blame on Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, for failing to control corruption in his government. It also points to the destabilising impact of the booming opium trade, which now accounts for at least half the national economy.

The White House has ordered a review of its policy and sent a team to Kabul led by Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the president's military adviser on Afghanistan, to assess the situation.

"We have had a tough summer. There is no doubt about it," a Nato source told the Guardian. "There are concerns, and we would share concerns the NIE has identified for better Afghan governance. We have said for some time the solution is political and not military."

The Afghan government has been reported to be holding talks with the Taliban, hosted by Saudi Arabia, but it is unclear whether those contacts would lead to comprehensive peace talks.

Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, has argued that Nato troops must confront Afghanistan's drug traffickers directly. The job has been left to Afghanistan's poorly trained and under-equipped police force. "Part of the problem that we face is that the Taliban make somewhere between $60m and $80m or more a year from the drug trafficking," Gates said at a Nato meeting in Budapest yesterday.

"... if we have the opportunity to go after drug lords and drug laboratories and try to interrupt this flow of cash to the Taliban, that seems to me like a legitimate security endeavour."

A proposed counter-narcotics mandate for Nato in Afghanistan divides opinion in Whitehall, putting the Foreign Office at odds with the Ministry of Defence.

The Foreign Office welcomed the move yesterday, saying Britain had been requesting it for years, in the face of resistance from some European allies. But British military officials were more sceptical, saying such operations would require the deployment of more forces.

"You can put your troops into counter-insurgency or you can go after the [drug trafficking] middleman but you can't do both," said a defence source.

British officers see the benefits of targeting drug laboratories and trafficking kingpins. But they argue that such operations should be undertaken primarily by Afghan forces, with Nato providing support. British diplomats are keen to emphasise that counter-narcotics efforts to date have brought results. They point to UN figures showing a 19% reduction in land under poppy cultivation last year, and a 6% fall in opium production. (The discrepancy between the two figures is explained by higher yields per hectare).

The NIE on Afghanistan appears destined to become an election issue in the final weeks of the contest between Barack Obama and John McCain.

The Pentagon plans to send another three brigades, up to 14,000 troops, to bolster the 33,000-strong US force there now, but in Budapest yesterday, US officials were urging their allies not to pull out when the American reinforcements arrive.

Meanwhile the United Arab Emirates has quietly become the 41st country contributing to the coalition effort in Afghanistan, although it is not clear what resources it intends to contribute.

The draft NIE on Afghanistan illustrates a darkening mood in western capitals. It follows a leaked French diplomatic dispatch quoting the British ambassador to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, as saying US strategy there had failed. The foreign secretary, David Miliband, said the report had "garbled" the British position.

 

[pkpatriotic]

A major new intelligence estimate by US defence establishment casts doubt on military strategy in Afghanistan

It hasn't been the most positive week for the US-led International Security Force for Afghanistan (ISAF). Last week, a French newspaper leaked a secret cable in which Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain's ambassador to that country said the situation in Afghanistan is getting worse and its government is mired in corruption. According to the report, Cowper-Coles, a man who is no stranger to controversy, said only "an acceptable dictator" could guarantee stability in the country.

That was followed on Sunday by remarks from Mark Carleton-Smith, commander of British forces in the country, that a decisive victory against the Taliban is impossible. Carleton-Smith said the Afghan conflict can only be ended through a political solution that includes the Taliban. His comments were supported by General Jean-Louis Georgelin, the chief of the French army.

Carleton-Smith was in part reacting to reports of peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government mediated by Saudi King Abdullah in Mecca last month. Such initiatives "should not make people uncomfortable", said Britain's top military commander in Afghanistan, "[because] that's precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this".

Those words were echoed by the UN's top official in Afghanistan. "We all know that we cannot win it militarily," said UN special envoy to Afghanistan Kai Eide. "It has to be won through political means. That means political engagement."

Whether or not Afghanistan is on the brink of collapse, the current mood reflects the growing realisation that military might alone cannot create stability. The Taliban may represent the most virulent strand of militant Islam, but it is also a major player in Afghanistan that has resisted successive attempts at its eradication. Britain and the UN's highest officials in Afghanistan have concluded that dialogue must replace open hostilities.

Unsurprisingly, Whitehall and Washington have dismissed such talk, although British foreign secretary David Milliband has not gone as far as denying Cowper-Coles' alleged comments.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates described the claims of impending military defeat in Afghanistan as defeatist. Officially, everyone from Karzai in Kabul to Bush in Washington are talking tough about the Taliban.

Yet it seems even the US defence community has doubts about the strategy in Afghanistan. Last week the New York Times reported that a major US intelligence estimate concludes that Afghanistan is in a "downward spiral". It effectively confirms what others like Carleton-Smith and Eide having been saying.

According to the New York Times, the leaked draft of this year's National Intelligence Estimate cites a breakdown in the Karzai government's authority, and an increase in corruption and the heroin trade, as having fundamentally undermined attempts to create a stable nation state. Last year's National Intelligence Estimate gained wide international coverage because it concluded, contrary to Bush Administration claims, that Iran did not possess nuclear weapons and had halted its attempts to produce them in 2003.

If the Times report is accurate, this year's NIE may prove to be another embarrassment for the Bush administration. On the positive side, it might also indicate that the bureaucrats are turning on the cold showers of realism sorely missed during the past eight years of Bush militarism that has fed on the simple, mythical belief in military solutions to complex social and political problems.

The conclusions reached in this year's NIE about US involvement in Afghanistan should come as no surprise. President Karzai does not control Afghanistan, despite the support of the world's only superpower and his success in presidential elections in 2004. He is known derisively in Afghanistan as the mayor of Kabul owing to his inability to control the vast territory beyond the country's capital. Those vast territories are almost entirely under the control of Afghanistan's feared warlords.

It is arguable that Karzai has no choice but to curry favour with warlords: in a country devastated by decades of war and with a population mired in poverty, military might has been the only guarantor of immediate political power. But we shouldn't be under the illusion that warlordism developed in Afghanistan organically. The US, along with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, had much to do with that power equation from the very moment it decided to militarise and Islamise Afghan society to defeat the Soviet Union. When the US swept into Afghanistan in October 2001, it paid several millions to warlords in an effort to create an alliance against the Taliban and capture it's and Al Qaeda's chief commanders.

The problem then, unlike in the decade after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, was not that the US neglected Afghanistan. Rather, the US invested in the very people who helped turn the sleepy haven for hippies that was Afghanistan in the 1970s into one of the most brutal conflict zones in the world.

Many, including the current Democrat-controlled Congress, have been critical of the unaccountable billions the US has pumped into Afghanistan. Most of that money has been spent on the war with the Taliban. Little consideration has been given for the long term repercussions of war for the development of the country.

It is perhaps telling that the increase in soul-searching over Afghanistan comes during the death throes of the Bush administration. Last month it commissioned a review of US policy on Afghanistan. US officials openly admit that the review will not dramatically alter current policies. Rather, it is aimed at assisting the next administration. Bush officials may soon have to justify eight years of the same, failed military campaign in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, the next President is likely to continue with more of the same. McCain and particularly Obama both speak of escalating the war with the Taliban. Whichever candidate wins in November, however, facts on the ground may compel him to replace the war plans with a negotiating table.

Here I would suggest to the Pakistani elites who proud to be a "Poodle" of United states, should rethink their act........(in view that their masters are now being collapesed milliterily but also facing worst historic financial crunch), and styill there is a time that they should come back to the pavalion and act like a patriotic as now there is dire need that Pakistan authorities should pay proper attention on that matter, so keep sharp monitoring on the situation, draw a strategical road map to have brilliant negociation to get maximum acts of benefits (benefits for the country not individually), as we already have paid heavy prices of their imposed war for nothing (While India enjoyed nurmous benfits as teh real partner, with out taking any risks). so get rid all of unnecessary pressures, be bold-be patriot.

 

[pkpatriotic]

Afghanistan's best hope is for controlled warlordism
Max Hastings
Monday October 13 2008

The Taliban are losing the battles but winning the war. The prognosis is wretched, yet we must sustain military aid

While most of the world spent the weekend trembling for its wealth, in Afghanistan the Taliban busied themselves dying in quite large numbers, during an ill-advised assault on Helmand's provincial capital, Lashkar Gar. Around 50 insurgents were killed, for no loss to Nato and Afghan security forces.

This fits the war's pattern. Almost every time the Taliban fights a battle, it loses to overwhelming firepower. Unfortunately, such western successes are strategically meaningless. Nato is absent from vast areas of this intractable country, where the insurgents prosper. There is greater gloom about the conflict than at any time since the Taliban was ousted in 2001.

I spent a week in Afghanistan in September, and was shocked by the deterioration since my last visit two years ago. The British army, which justly prides itself on its "can-do" philosophy, has been sobered by recent experience. Its casualties are acceptable within a context of progress. But they become dismaying against a background of growing Taliban influence and slumping confidence in the Kabul government.

President Bush has decreed an American troop "surge" in Afghanistan. Some 10,000 additional troops will be committed under General David Petraeus, the Iraq "miracle worker" who now runs US Central Command.

Petraeus, the most impressive soldier America has produced since Colin Powell, is a clever and charismatic leader who might one day emerge as a presidential candidate. But he is well aware that Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is a far more primitive society, whose people find it hard to perceive the merits of any central government - least of all one as corrupt as President Hamid Karzai's - and which is now trapped in a narco-economy.

It is almost impossible for westerners, military and civilian alike, to engage with Afghans. Almost none speak the language. It is only possible to travel outside heavily fortified bases in helicopters or armoured vehicles. Afghan gratitude for the creation of a few schools and hospitals is outweighed by the simple fact that, in a diplomat's words: "Seven years ago most of the population felt safe. Now they don't."

He added brutally: "The British army has been irresponsible in suggesting that it could do the business in Helmand. We should never have taken it on. It's much more than we can handle."

The only bright spot in an overwhelmingly dark picture is the growing effectiveness of the Afghan army. Its troops are fighting well, as Afghans usually do, whoever they happen to be shooting at. Smart westerners argue that we should abandon any notion that Nato can win this war with its own troops, instead concentrating on helping Afghans to defend their own government - if they are willing.

The Kabul regime is pitifully short of credible people to run the country. I met Barna Karimi, the deputy local government minister, a 34-year-old former exile who spent 17 years in California before returning here to work for Karzai. Unsurprisingly, he talks the language of US business schools: "We have developed a strategic framework," he says. "We are constantly evaluating the performance of our governors and district governors. We have formulated a social outreach programme which revives the traditional role of the community. You guys" - he means westerners, of course - "don't have the problem of lacking a system. I am trying to create a system without qualified people."

Listening to this fluent but unmistakably Californian young social engineer, parachuted into Afghanistan from an unimaginably alien culture, I found it impossible to believe that Afghans relate to him as one of themselves.

The newish governor of Helmand, Gulab Mangal, is much more convincing. He is 52 years old and a former commissar in the Afghan army in Russian times; he was a businessman and ruler of two other provinces before he was transferred to Helmand during the summer. The British are much in love with Mangal, whom they perceive as one of the country's only honest and able officials. Their enthusiasm is dangerous, however. It feeds Karzai's morbid suspicions of him as a prospective rival.

When I told Mangal how much his efforts are admired, he said wryly: "Nobody in Kabul seems to appreciate them."He acknowledges that more than half of Helmand is today under Taliban control." When government can't deliver, "he said, "people think it better to have no government. We need to convince people that we are working for them. If we cannot do that, it would be better to go."

I found it easy to understand why foreigners are so impressed by Mangal's poise and courage. There are few people in Afghanistan whom more people want to kill. Every time he goes out to walk in a bazaar, there is a real chance that he will come back dead.

The British are desperately impatient for the impending US change of government. They believe that an Obama presidency will recognise the impossibility of military solutions in Afghanistan. It might throw its weight behind finding a substitute for Karzai and talking a way out of this shambles.

On these pages Simon Jenkins has said from the outset that the Afghan war is unwinnable. I have always shared his dismay about western blundering. Yet it seems to me that we must keep trying, though the odds against success are greater than ever. It is futile to escalate the Nato troop commitment. The only slender chance of stabilising Afghanistan lies in sustaining military and economic aid for Afghans to help themselves.

The highest aspiration must be for controlled warlordism, not conventional democracy. A civil war may prove an essential preliminary before some crude equilibrium between factions can be achieved. If this sounds a wretched prognosis, it is hard to find informed westerners with higher expectations.

 

[pkpatriotic]

U.S. general says he's hopeful about war against Taliban
By John F. Burns
October 13, 2008

KABUL, Afghanistan: Less than 12 hours after NATO troops in Afghanistan defeated an ambitious attempt by the Taliban to storm a provincial capital in the far southwest, killing dozens of the fighters, the top American commander in the country urged doubters Sunday to believe that the war against the Taliban would be won.

The commander, General David McKiernan, who leads more than 65,000 troops from about 40 foreign countries, including 33,000 Americans, said at a news conference in Kabul that there had been "too many" reports in the media recently asserting that the foreign forces and their Afghan allies were losing the war.

"I absolutely reject that idea, I don't believe it," the general said, adding: "It is true that there are many places in this country that don't have an adequate level of security. We don't have progress as even and as fast as any of us would like. But we are not losing in Afghanistan."

At another point, he was more emphatic. There are major challenges facing the war effort, he said, "But we will win."

The news conference was held on the general's return from Washington, where he participated in a wide-ranging review of war strategy in Afghanistan. Earlier, the NATO command confirmed that its forces battled several hundred Taliban fighters at nightfall on Saturday as they prepared to attack Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, the center of Afghanistan's opium trade and one of the most heavily contested battlefields of the war.

A statement by the International Security Assistance Force, the official name of the NATO operation commanded by McKiernan, said its forces had attacked the Taliban fighters at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, when the Taliban were preparing to launch a mortar attack on the city. At his news conference, McKiernan said that fighting had continued until daybreak on Sunday, and that "a large number of Taliban" had been killed.

Dawood Ahmadi, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said by telephone that 62 Taliban fighters had been killed.

The spokesman said that a separate battle by Afghan and NATO troops to regain control of Nadali District, 15 miles west of Lashkar Gah, had ended Saturday after two days and that 40 Taliban fighters had been killed there.

If accurate, the figures would make the fighting among the most intensive that NATO forces have experienced with the resurgent Taliban. Lieutenant Colonel Woody Page, a spokesman for the British forces in Helmand, said that about 50 Taliban were killed at Lashkar Gah, according to Agence-France Presse. He also confirmed that the Taliban had been driven out of Nadali, but he did not give a Taliban death toll there.

The NATO command statement said that its forces at Lashkar Gah had reacted to the sighting of Taliban fighters assembling outside the city by conducting an airstrike "in which multiple enemy forces were killed," and that the strike was combined with a ground assault involving NATO and Afghan forces.

The wording of the statement suggested that the command viewed the Lashkar Gah attack as another in a series of so-called spectacular strikes by the Taliban in recent months in which the Taliban have aimed to demoralize NATO forces and Afghanistan's roughly 30 million people and create a groundswell of opinion here that the American-led forces are heading for the same dismal fate that met the Soviet occupation force in the 1980s.

NATO officers had warned that major Taliban strikes might be launched before winter, when fighting in Afghanistan has usually declined. In its statement on the Lashkar Gah attack, the command quoted Brigadier General Richard Blanchette, the Canadian who is the principal command spokesman, as saying, "If the insurgents planned a spectacular attack prior to the winter, this was a spectacular failure."

All the same, the Taliban, even in defeat, appeared to have served notice that as they neared the seventh anniversary of the collapse of Taliban rule in Kabul they have reorganized into a formidable fighting force. Several times this year, they have shown that they are capable of massing hundreds of fighters for attacks in the east, south and southwest of Afghanistan that are within a few days' trek of militant sanctuaries in the border areas of Pakistan.

In July, a large force of Taliban fighters carried out a bold assault on a remote American base in Kunar Province, close to the Pakistan border. Nine American soldiers were killed. That attack followed another daring attempt to threaten a major southern city, Kandahar. After a prolonged Taliban buildup in the Arghandab district, just outside Kandahar, Afghan and NATO forces struck in late June, clearing hundreds of Taliban fighters from 18 villages in the area and killing 56, according to NATO statements at the time.

American commanders have said that overall violence across the country has risen about 30 percent in the past year, with record numbers of casualties among American and other NATO troops. The United Nations has put the number of Afghan civilians killed so far in 2008 at nearly 4,000.

Confidence among Afghan citizens has plummeted, contributing to urgent calls by Western commanders and diplomats for a new war-fighting strategy that can put the effort here back on an ascending path.

At his news conference, McKiernan appeared concerned about stemming the tide of pessimism. The general took command here in June, and he introduced a note of concern early on by saying that he did not believe NATO troops were winning, but that they could with a more effective approach. The message he appeared to have brought back from Washington was that doubts about the war had gone too far.

But he issued a new warning about inadequate NATO troop levels, a point made insistently in recent weeks by Robert M. Gates, the American defense secretary, and McKiernan and General David Petraeus, the two four-star American commanders who will now oversee the war here.

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

 

[RabzonKhan]

Afghan insurgency spreads, attacks rise sharply - U.N.

Tue Oct 14, 2008 By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The insurgency in Afghanistan has spread beyond Taliban strongholds in the south and east while the number of attacks in the country has reached a six-year high, a top U.N. envoy said on Tuesday.

Violence in Afghanistan this year is worse than at any time since U.S.-led and Afghan forces toppled the militant Islamist Taliban in 2001 and fears are growing among NATO members that they are losing the military campaign and the support of ordinary Afghans.

"In July and August we witnessed the highest number of security incidents since 2002," U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan Kai Eide told the U.N. Security Council. There was a nearly 40 percent rise over the same period in 2007, he said.

Eide said the insurgency has spread beyond the south and east and extended to provinces around Kabul. There has also been an increase in attacks on civilians, including aid-related and humanitarian personnel, he added.

However, Eide sharply criticized what he said were overly pessimistic assessments of the situation.

"I would really caution against the gloom and doom statements that we've seen recently," he said. "Many of them really go too far."

On the positive side, Eide said, there has been a significant improvement in relations between Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.

Afghan, U.S., NATO and U.N. officials say that Taliban and al Qaeda militants move across Afghanistan's long and porous border with Pakistan. This makes Islamabad a key partner if the war against the Afghan insurgency is to be won, they say.

U.S. SAYS SUCCESS ACHIEVABLE

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad urged U.N. member states to increase their humanitarian aid to Afghanistan to help it cope with the coming winter and potential food shortages.

Despite worsening security, victory is not lost, he said.

"Success can be achieved, despite the recent talk of doom and gloom," said Khalilzad, who was born in Afghanistan.

But success does not hinge on achieving military objectives alone, he said, rather on Kabul combating corruption, enforcing the rule of law, achieving economic development, fighting the narcotics trade and reforming the police.

Afghanistan's U.N. Ambassador Zahir Tanin acknowledged that the situation has grown worse.

"Despite hard work on the part of international coalition forces and Afghans alike, terrorism appears to be on the rise again," he told the council.

"The Taliban burn down schools, stamp out reconstruction, and butcher civilians," Tanin said. "Ordinary people are increasingly their targets."

However, he warned news organizations against excessive pessimism in their depictions of his country.

He said the Taliban have used "some recent statements and reports" in an attempt to convince the Afghan population that international community's resolve is wavering.

British commander Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith told a British newspaper this month that the war against the Taliban could not be won. His comments were widely reported.

 

[pkpatriotic]

Bush admin urged to explore talks with Taliban forsaking violence

NEW YORK, Oct 15 (APP): With all U.S. intelligence agencies warning that Afghanistan is on a dangerous "downward spiral”, a leading U.S. newspaper Wednesday urged the Bush administration to drop its resistance to working with tribal leaders to fight the Taliban.

“The time for worrying about undermining President (Hamid) Karzai is long past. Reconciliation talks should also be explored with members of the Taliban “ if they forsake violence,” The New York Times said in an editorial, which also calls for more incentives to Pakistan to crack down on al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

“After years of denial and negligence, President (George W.) Bush and his aides are finally waking up to the desperate mess they've made in Afghanistan. They have little choice, since the alarms are coming from all corners,” it said.

The editorial, captioned ‘Downward Spiral’ said:

“Under pressure from the United States and other NATO governments, Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, appointed a new interior minister over the weekend who will be charged with cleaning up and strengthening the country’s police force. Mr. Karzai now must cut all ties with corrupt officials. He must take a hard and credible look at allegations that his brother may be involved in the heroin trade that is pouring $100 million annually into the Taliban’s coffers.

“The United States will also have to send more troops into Afghanistan and persuade its allies to send more. It’s chilling to watch America’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, begging NATO “ and the White House for help. Germany’s commitment of another 1,000 troops is commendable but marred by its refusal to deploy them in southern Afghanistan where the fighting is heaviest. NATO members that can’t or won’t send more troops must contribute money to build Afghanistan’s national army and finance local development.

“NATO’s recent decision to authorize its forces to go after drug lords and drug labs is a (much belated) start, but it still has far too many strings attached ...

Washington must also come up with a better mixture of incentives and pressures to persuade Pakistan to shut down Taliban and Al Qaeda havens. The country’s new civilian leaders and army chief say that they understand the threat posed by militants and are willing to fight them. That must be encouraged, including with more carefully monitored military and economic aid.

“Imagine if Mr. Bush had not invaded Iraq in 2003 and instead put all of this country’s resources and attention into defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Even optimistic analysts say that things have now gotten so bad that, with the best strategy, it could take another 5 to 10 years to stabilize Afghanistan.

“That is one more reason why the next president must plot a swift, orderly exit from Iraq and begin a swift and serious buildup of troops and aid in Afghanistan “ the real frontline in the war on terror”

 

[ejaz007]

Million dollar question is that is US economy strong enough to handle two conflicts that are supposed to last for 5-10 years.